Tuesday, March 02, 2010

The English failed to grasp two issues. They failed to see Barack Obama as a racially based "Community Organizer" and assumed that he had merely exploited that base, as any normal politician does in their experience, but had by virtue of his education transcended that background to become one of them. In their modest opinion that was damned inclusive and decent of the English. In fact they were so busy slapping themselves on the back that they didn't manage to look at or listen to the person they were welcoming into their club. The second mistake of the English was that they thought that they understood American racial politics.

The belief of the English that they have some special gift for understanding tribal politics is based on their historical experience. For hundreds of years now they have been dealing with tribal grievances among the yellow, brown, red, or white in the world. Joe Hill to them is just another backwards bigot and all the easier to manipulate for that, once separated from dangerous objects or even better pointed at another target.

The English used that model to assume that America was a place like all the others subject to the tribal politics that had sustained the Empire and justify a belief that Obama was another coopted local boy eager for their approval, like Jinnah of Pakistan was. They fundamentally misread the nature of America and our racial demons. Liberals do promote hyphenated identity politics among all groups in a way that dissolves the unifying bonds of citizenship. For most Americans, White, Asian and even I believe from most of Latin America, whether Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Hindu or Buddhist, the melting pot is still a real thing. Only for most Black American and a large segment of the recent Hispanic migrants is that not true. Teddy Roosevelt spoke eloquently against divided loyalties.

Barack Obama is not a leader of one tribe engaged in a negotiation with a random assortment of other tribes. The Euro-elites hoped he would prove capable of uniting all of the backwards American tribes in a common purpose approved of by the benevolent Wise Clerks of Oxenford. What he is instead is a true alien to the community who has the support of a sizable and apparently indigestible minority that sees itelf in permanent opposition to all other members of the polity.

It is two generations since the end of legal discrimination in America. It is seven generations since the end of chattel slavery. The percentage of Americans who are descended from those who owned slaves or profited from their trade is insignificant, and I suspect concentrated among adherents of the Democratic Party. The belief that has taken root among a large percentage of Black Americans that they are engaged in a permanent state of conflict with White America, and the British, makes their alliance with the Islamist world, with its language of an unending war with the Dar al Harb extremely troubling.